Northern Irish actor Jamie Dornan.TOLGA AKMEN/AFP/Getty Images
Cheeky. “That’s the word I’ve been called most in my life,” the actor Jamie Dornan said in a phone interview this week. I’d bet his sense of humour helps him deal with the ribbing he takes for playing BDSM aficionado Christian Grey in the Fifty Shades franchise. Cheeky is also the word he uses to describe the levity that buoys his fellow Belfasters.
“We’ve all learned to use humour to leaven the dark,” Dornan says. (His Northern Irish accent is evident in every Mobius strip of a vowel, where “now” is “nyeoh” and “on” is “oon.”) “Everyone from there, no matter what your situation, you’ve experienced dark times as a result of what was going on.”
He’s talking about the Troubles, the bloody, 30-year civil conflict between those who wanted Northern Ireland reunified with Ireland (who were mainly Catholic) and those who wanted it to remain under British rule (mainly Protestant). Dornan was born in 1982, smack in the middle of the violence, and raised in a middle-class suburb. The beginning of that conflict, and how it ripped the community apart, is the subject of Dornan’s new film, Belfast.
Written and directed by Kenneth Branagh and based on his own childhood, Belfast is a nostalgic, elegiac love letter to the city. Set in 1969, shot in black and white, and threaded through with that cheeky humour, the film is dedicated to those who stayed, those who left and those who were lost to the violence. (In September, it won the People’s Choice award at the Toronto International Film Festival, a harbinger of Oscar attention.)
Jude Hill, left, and Jamie Dornan in director Kenneth Branagh's Belfast.Rob Youngson / Focus Features/Focus Features
Branagh’s surrogate is nine-year-old Buddy, played by newcomer Jude Hill – who is also a Belfaster, as is Ciaran Hinds, who plays Buddy’s grandfather. Judi Dench plays Buddy’s grandmother, and Dornan and Caitriona Balfe (Outlander) are his glamorous parents. A bubbly scamp, Buddy zooms around his corner of the city like he owns it, certain that everyone knows him and is watching out for him. Until the day a Protestant mob crashes down his block, intimidating Catholics to move away. Soon his street is barricaded, soldiers mass at the exits and bombs begin to explode, forcing Buddy’s Protestant parents to make a painful choice: Stay and suffer, or move to England and leave everyone they love?
The conflict shaped Dornan’s life, too, “in a massive way.” His school was in the tiny minority in the country – five per cent – attended by both Protestants and Catholics. “So that idea of division, sectarianism and tribalism didn’t land with me,” he says. “But that didn’t mean I wasn’t fully aware of what was going on.” Almost every other weekend, his plans to meet friends in the centre of town – the one area where Protestants and Catholics peacefully co-existed – were upended by bomb scares. “We were so blasé about that, thought it was totally normal,” he says. “We’d cancel our plans and try again the next week.”
Belfast remains a “post-conflict society,” Dornan continues, with huge divisions. That was starkly evident when I was there in 2016 to interview Gillian Anderson, who was shooting the TV series The Fall with Dornan: The city was split into Catholic and Protestant zones; each side went to their own schools, pubs and churches, occasionally meeting in midtown; and the main road between the zones was lined with high concrete walls and gated off after dark. The people liked it that way, my many taxi drivers assured me – it kept violence damped down.
Caitriona Balfe stars as 'Ma' and Jamie Dornan stars as 'Pa' in Belfast.Rob Youngson / Focus Features/Focus Features
Dornan, who now lives in Gloucestershire, England, is married to the English actress and singer-songwriter Amelia Warner, with whom he has three daughters. But he still considers himself a Belfaster, and speaks glowingly about its resilient and generous people, its cosmopolitan restaurant scene, its brilliant pubs and the vibrancy of its entertainment business (Game of Thrones shot there).
In fact, Belfast was the first movie in the U.K. made under COVID-19 protocols. During a two-week rehearsal period, “Ken got us to open up about our own childhoods, peel some layers away, be vulnerable in front of each other,” Dornan says.” He and Balfe, who share a similar past – they were both models before becoming actors – bonded during dance rehearsals for a key scene. “That was a great way of bringing us together, because it didn’t come naturally to either of us, she won’t mind me saying,” he adds, yes, cheekily.
One of the scenes that meant the most to Dornan didn’t make the final cut. It was the last thing they shot, and Branagh himself was in it, because there was a version of the ending where he comes back to Belfast as a grown man. “He cut himself out of his own movie,” Dornan says, “which not many would do.”
In that scene, Branagh and his key cast simply walked down the centre of the street, while the production blasted Van Morrison’s song, And the Healing Has Begun. “We luckily had our backs to the camera,” Dornan recalls, “because I think all of us were sobbing.”
The emotion was warranted, because Belfast arrives at an important moment. “It’s a precarious time in the landscape of peace right now at home,” Dornan says. “Mainly because of Brexit, which has put a border into the Irish Sea, while trying to maintain there isn’t a border on the island of Ireland. It’s thrown into turmoil people’s already very complicated understanding and view of their identity. You’ve got a lot of people now really unsure of what the best way forward is.”
Art has a chance to help here, Dornan believes: “What’s lovely about this film, it ends with me saying to Buddy, ‘Your friend [who is Catholic] can be anything, as long as you love and respect each other she’s welcome in our house every day of the week.’ I think that’s a strong and important message to get to people at home. It’s applicable to all parts of the world, particularly places that have experienced civil war or blatant tribalism within their communities. But it’s especially important at this time to remind people in Northern Ireland that it’s not worth all the fighting.”
Belfast is now playing in select theatres across Canada
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